Nintendo wall graphics at Thinkgeek

In their latest newsletter, Thinkgeek highlights the Nintendo Wall Graphics product, which is a set of large vinyl stickers that can be reversibly applied to most walls to create scenes from either Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong. I have quite a soft spot for Super Mario Bros., having played it in arcades back when Flynn was fighting the MCP, before becoming accomplished in it on the NES. When I saw the mural advertising the Nintendo wall graphics I was quite excited and keen to get a hold of the graphics myself, to create a similar scene at home.

However, looking at the contents of the wall graphics package for Super Mario Bros. is a little disappointing when comparing it to the photograph. I can understand a little embellishment to show a product in a good light but it shouldn't give unreasonable expectations. It looks like the main mural, showing Mario punching a mushroom out of a block, would take three full packs of graphics to create, and that is ignoring the additional mural with Luigi to the left. I would say, though, that the problem lies within the package itself.

There are three sheets of stickers in the pack, and only one of them is dedicated to scenery, where scenery takes up most of the graphics in most games. With two sheets containing versions of Mario and Luigi, as well as items that are rarely found on the screen at the same time as each other, it seems like poor design. Adding one more sheet of scenery blocks would go a long way to making the pack offer more value as a whole, and it would surely have been better to include all the one-use items on a single sheet, one that could perhaps be sold separately. A character/item pack and a scenery pack would probably see many more sales, based mostly on the scenery pack, than the set as it currently stands.

Nevertheless, despite the cost of the item coupled with needing more than one pack to recreate anything more than a sparse scene from the game it is awfully tempting. I will print out a couple of copies of the available stickers on to paper and cut them out to see what I can create before I even think about placing an order, though.

Posted in Gaming, Personal |
Tags: nintendo, super mario bros, thinkgeek